You (You #1)(38)

“Most guys don’t wanna know stuff,” you say. “Most guys would freak out at me right now. The crying and the shrinking and the shopping.”

“You know too many guys,” I say and you smile and you know you need me and you nod like you agree, like you’re agreeing to us, seeing the light, and the captain blows the horn. You kiss me.

IN the movie 500 Days of Summer, IKEA is the most romantic place on earth. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and the girl start out in one kitchen and she’s sweet on him and pretending to feed him dinner and when the faucet doesn’t work—the joke being that all the appliances are props—Joseph jumps out of his chair and walks through a doorway into another kitchen and she is in awe of him and he says, “That’s why we bought a home with two kitchens.” I watched the clip right after you tweeted about going to IKEA and it’s not like I’m some moron who expects life to be like the movies, but it has to be said.

Life at IKEA is not like life at IKEA in the movies.

In real life, I am not Joseph Gordon-Levitt and I have to push a giant metal shopping cart, weaving through the masses while you point out sofas you don’t need, wall units you don’t have room for, and ovens that are made of cardboard. There are a million people crowding this gargantuan converted warehouse. It’s a dystopian nightmare come true where all furniture is cut from the same hunk of cheap-ass wood, where all rooms were furnished with items that came out of the exact same factory at the exact same time. It smells like body odor and Febreze and baby shit and farts and meatballs and nail polish and more baby shit—doesn’t anyone get a babysitter anymore?—and it is loud, Beck, and I miss half the things you say because I can’t hear you over the other humans. And all the while, I am consciously not thinking about where the red ladles might be in this hellacious sprawl of new shit.

In 500 Days of Summer, the chick challenges Joseph to a race from the kitchen to the bedroom and the camera follows them as they run through an aisle. The chick flies onto the mattress and Joseph comes next, at a slow crawl. He mounts her and she wants him, you can see it. He whispers, “Darling, I don’t know how to tell you this, but there’s a Chinese family in our bedroom.”

In real life, there is also a Chinese family in IKEA with us, but they are nothing like the quiet family in the movie. There is a small boy who screams and a small girl who poops in a diaper and drools. It feels like they’re following us, Beck, and I’m going to lose it if they don’t stop fighting. They’re so fucking loud that I can’t hear what you’re saying. You pick up a yellow, fringed pillow and I am sick of missing out on your words. What if you said something important? What if you revealed something to me and I missed it?

You excuse yourself as you squeeze by the Chinese woman, who has stopped abruptly to examine an unremarkable round table. She could get out of the way but she doesn’t. You practically have to boost yourself onto the back side of the hunk of junk they call a sofa in order to get closer to me. That woman has nerve and I want to tell her but you hold my hand and maybe it’s not so bad after all.

“Feel this,” you say. You push the pillow into my hand. I look down and I can see your black panties just below the belt of your white jeans. They’ve stretched out from all your monkeying around and you’re holding my hand and breathing and you don’t smell like IKEA and just like that, I’m hard.

“It’s soft, right?”

“Yeah,” I say. The Chinese dad slams his fist on the table. Bam! We’re both startled and the moment ends as you drop the pillow. If this were 500 Days of Summer, we wouldn’t be able to hear him over the Hall & Oates that would be playing just for us. You pick up another pillow, pink. You press it into my palm.

“Well, what about this one?”

I’m your putty and you’ve got your hair in a bun and you’re not looking at me even though you know I’m looking at you and you smile and keep your eyes on my hand on the pillow and you whisper, “I think this is good.”

“Me too,” I murmur. I’ve barely been able to hear you speaking for the past couple of hours and your voice is heaven. I missed it.

You look up at me with sweet eyes. “It just feels good, you know?”

“Yeah,” I say and it does.

“You can tell when something is right because most things are just plain wrong.”

“Yeah,” I say and you have to be talking about us, not some twelve-dollar piece of Swedish chazerai, but you won’t look at me, you won’t let me all the way in yet. So fuck it. This is all too good and I’m gonna break in.

“Hey, Beck,” I say.

“Yeah?” you say but your eyes are on the pillow, not me.

“I like you.”

You smile. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I say and I put my other hand on your shoulder and now you’re looking at me. We’re so close that I can see the pores you’re always trying to shrink and I can see the eyebrows you didn’t pluck this morning, because this morning you didn’t know you were gonna want me. This morning I watched you get ready in five minutes flat.

“So we’ll get the pillow?” you say.

“Yeah,” I say and it won’t be long until I’m inside of you. We’ve just made a pact and we know it and I don’t know who grabs whose hand. I just know that we’re holding hands and you’re holding the pillow and we’re weaving in and out of bedrooms and now you’re helping me, you’ve got a hand on the front of the cart. We are in this together, side by side, navigating like an old couple, like a new couple, and you know what, Beck?